"Red Widow" is a sign that, at least when it comes to television, women are achieving parity

Radha Mitchell plays a woman being held responsible by a big-time crime lord for a lost drug shipment.

Equal work, equal pay, equal opportunity to be a flawed television anti-hero …

Although that last issue hasn't exactly been a rallying cry for women, it is an area where we're definitely achieving parity.

The latest reminder of this is Marta Walraven, the protagonist of ABC's heavily promoted "Red Widow," which bows tonight. She starts out as an average wife and mother, but becomes embroiled in a shady underworld and agrees, albeit reluctantly, to do things she knows to be both illegal and immoral.

Male characters, of course, have long been allowed to be flawed — from morally ambiguous to downright criminal, from rules-bending good guys like Detective John Kelly on "NYPD Blue" or Agent Jack Bauer on "24" — who sometimes did bad things in the name of a greater good — to sometimes likable bad guys like mob boss Tony Soprano, corrupt cop Vic Mackey and serial killer Dexter Morgan.

It's hard to say where Marta Walraven will eventually fall on that spectrum.

When we first meet her, she's living with her husband and three kids in a nice but hardly palatial house in Marin County, just north of San Francisco. To viewers, it quickly becomes apparent that handsome hubby Evan is not just in the deep-sea fishing business. Unbeknownst to Marta, he supports his family by exporting marijuana.

Having grown up in the world of organized crime — Marta's father, Andrei Petrov, and his loyal bodyguard, Luther, are Russian gangsters (or "Bratva") – Marta never wanted a life of crime for her own family.

But after Evan is gunned down in their driveway, she discovers that he and his business partners — Marta's duplicitous brother, Irwin (Wil Traval), and their best friend, Mike (Lee Tergesen) – had been involved in the theft of $1.5 million worth of cocaine from fearsome international crime boss Nicholae Schiller (Goran Visnjic, in a very different role from the doctor he played on "ER"). Those drugs are now missing. And Schiller holds Evan's widow responsible for the debt.

In order to save her own life and protect her children, Marta agrees to do a job for Schiller — involving another big shipment of drugs. But will he let her off the hook if she does that?

Based on the Dutch series "Penoza," the American version is fairly compelling, but moves slowly in its first two hours. It ends with Schiller giving Marta the date, time and location of the job — and before we learn if Marta will completely lose her moral compass.

Over the first two hours, Marta lies to the FBI and sets out to seduce (to a point) a debt-ridden dock supervisor into taking a bribe. But she's still basically playing the nice-person card.

And even though she turned down the government's help — FBI agent James Ramos (Clifton Collins Jr.) promised Marta justice in exchange for her cooperation, but she couldn't go against the Bratva code — we're supposed to see Marta as basically having no choice. She is given something many male anti-heroes are not — a justification for her offensive actions.

This is also true with TV's other flawed female protagonists. On "Homeland," agent Mathison's judgment is clouded by her bipolar disorder. Emily Thorne of "Revenge" is obsessed with vengeance because her father was framed for a terrorist act, then murdered in prison. Detective Sarah Linden spent her childhood in and out of foster homes.

Dr. Hunt had to give up neurosurgery after a car accident left her with paresthesia — periodic attacks of numbness and cramping of her hands — and she lost a patient on the operating table. Olivia Pope would fix anything (even the presidential election) because she's madly in love with the married man she helped to put in the Oval Office. And Elizabeth Jennings is a KGB spy who deeply believes in her country and her cause.

Interestingly, both Elizabeth and Marta are played by angelic-looking blue-eyed blondes, which makes their wrongdoing seem even more dramatic.

In the case of "Red Widow," much remains to be seen. How far will Marta go to protect her family? Will she come to like the taste of crime? Will she come to side with the FBI? Will she find a way to stay alive without selling her soul?

And will Marta fare as well with viewers as the other flawed heroines that she joins?